Top Challenges in Clinical Data Management

Top Challenges in Clinical Data Management

Today, all modern industries and companies are embracing the power of digital technologies. The healthcare industry is also following the trend by using patient data management systems, which keeps track of patient information and medical history thereby replacing handwritten medical files. Since patient data is sensitive, medical companies and professionals should adopt new strategies to […]

Today, all modern industries and companies are embracing the power of digital technologies. The healthcare industry is also following the trend by using patient data management systems, which keeps track of patient information and medical history thereby replacing handwritten medical files. Since patient data is sensitive, medical companies and professionals should adopt new strategies to manage such healthcare data securely. Clinical data management simplifies a lot of operational tasks thereby increases the efficiency of healthcare providers. However, it can be challenging to manage such large and complex sets of healthcare data. Clinical data management is further complicated by various government regulations and compliance issues.

HIPAA Compliance

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires security measures for EHRs to be shared among medical practitioners and be made accessible to patients. Majority of the healthcare providers have to balance between operating a closed-network system and implementing shared data access and security protocols. Also, after providing a platform to share data between practitioners, a data breach could costhealthcare companies significantly higher than in other industries.

Sharing Patient Data

Sharing patient data is still a grey area for players in the medical industry. Some regulations restrict sharing of data with a medical representative and other medical professionals. To tackle such issues, the medical industry is working on strategies like EHRs and cloud computing to facilitate sharing of clinical data. Additionally, integrating and standardizing the sharing platform for every medical professional to grant access to healthcare data is also an ongoing challenge.

Mobile Computing

The demanding nature of today’s digital technology has placed great importance on mobile computing. Professionals want access to data at the comfort within their fingertips. However, shifting the platform to mobile devices seems quite a challenge in the field of clinical data management. It’s a lot easier to upload medical entries to a tablet directly then scribbling on medical charts for transcription later. The problem arises when providing a secure wireless access throughout the care facility to medical professionals. It requires developing a completely new security and compliance protocols for mobile devices.

Operational Analytics

The clinical data management systems and EHRs have helped improve the quality of care that is provided to the patients. Alongside patients, healthcare professionals and workforce has also benefitted with a substantial increase in operational efficiency. For instance, healthcare workforce management is largely measured using patient care and healthcare data, which isn’t an ideal metric for performance measurement. As a result, it has urged HIS managers to look for new strategies to mine healthcare data in order to perform productivity and profitability analytics to identify true measure of performance and identify improvement areas.